Sapphire Energy, a producer of the world’s first renewable crude oil, fully repaid its $54.5 million loan guarantee early. The loan was awarded to Sapphire Energy by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2009 through the Biorefinery Assistance Program.

“Sapphire Energy is very grateful to the USDA for supporting algae crude oil as an alternative source of energy as well as our vision to make this industry a reality,” said Cynthia ‘CJ’ Warner, CEO and chairman of Sapphire Energy. “With their backing, we did exactly what we set out to do. We grew our company, advanced our algae technologies, and built, on time and on budget, the first, fully operational, commercial demonstration, algae-to-energy facility that delivers a proven process for producing refinery-ready Green Crude oil. We could not have built this first of a kind facility without the support of the USDA. Moving forward, our focus is on commercializing our technology and expanding operations to bring crude oil production to commercial demonstration scale as planned.”

Sapphire Energy is now working on scaling up its production of the world's first renewable crude oil. The company built its Green Crude Farm, which promotes algae crude oil production from cultivation to extraction. Its biofuel is made from photosynthetic microorganisms like algae and cyanobacteria, and uses sunlight and carbon dioxide as their feedstock. Also, its biofuel is not dependent on food crops or farmland, does not use potable water, does not result in biodiesel or ethanol, and is low carbon, renewable and scalable.

The farm has created over 600 jobs throughout its phase 1 construction with about 30 full-time employees currently operating the facility.

Sapphire Energy plans to produce 100 barrels of crude oil per day in 2015, and hit commercial-scale production in 2018.

This isn't the first government loan to be paid off early this year. Back in May, Tesla Motors repaid its $465 million loan to the U.S. Department of Energy nine years early.

Add in the fact that the Chinese are subsidizing everything related to energy so that they are the defacto place to produce everything, and you will see even more companies trying to compete in that skewed market fail. And once all the outside competition fails, China will raise the prices. China has already done this on rare earth minerals (which are not really that rare). Over the last 20 years China has been flooding the market with subsidized rare earths to drop the price below what other mines could produce and be profitable. Now that they are the only ones with active mines they cut shipments of rare earths to any manufacturing site located outside China, which has skyrocketed prices, and at the same time shifted the manufacturing of the devices that used them (everything from generators and turbines, to speakers and TV's, to guided missiles) to need to be made in China since you can get the materials in China for cheap as long as they are used in products that are fully manufactured in China, thus sucking away all the jobs from other countries which needed rare earths.